Well, at Revolution we are going to trial this exact statement. We are testing a piece of software that links into our customer system. The idea with this software is that when people call in with a specific issue, you select that issue on their account and it will then run you through a diagnostic process.

It allows us to then give the same level of service to every person we deal with who has that same issue. We were concerned that it might make us a little automated or a ‘computer says no’ type of company. There is always that concern with this type of software, but we ran a number of scenarios through this and believe it can give much better customer service.

Built into these processes are what are called hand-off indicators. These are sections of the process which indicate that the issue needs to be escalated to a different person, or further information needs to be gained to allow it to proceed. These processes contain timelines and automated responses.

In the fast-paced world that we live in, people seem to want consistency of what is delivered. What seems to annoy people the most is if they have to deal with a company with the same issue twice but get different answers. This will also allow anyone in the business to pick up the problem and see exactly where the previous person had got to within the workflow.

We estimate it might take us up until the New Year to process drive most issues that come into the business. There are still going to be numerous ones that appear that we will then have to work on.

As we implement this new software it will be interesting to see how the stats that the business measures change. For instance, we measure the speed of resolution of each issue and with this software, we would hope that the speed of resolution will become faster. We like to be innovative in our approach to managing buildings, and we also have to find ways to produce the best results but faster.

Over the next three months, we will evaluate this completely and then report back on its success levels.